Many valuable books and other materials have been published that center on themes of productivity, improvement, purpose, organization, goals, happiness, and the like. Tremendous benefits can be reaped by those who read, extract, and apply the lessons provided.
At an extremely high level, existing frameworks all consist of two portions: what and why. While the details vary considerably across frameworks, all seem to correctly highlight the enormous improvements that are available simply by explicitly thinking about, writing a plan for, and executing tasks that detail your answer to these two fundamental questions. From there, most authors have focused considerably on the subject of tasks: how to enumerate them, how to prioritize them, and how to execute them.
Many millions have successfully improved facets of their lives from learning and living these ideas, but have found that they are not broad enough to cover all areas of life, and therefore can’t be used as a universal model for living. Many more millions have struggled to find ways of integrating the material into their lives, not fitting into the mold of those the materials were written for.
Those familiar with prior content will find that the model presented in this book provides new ideas that more readily connect all scales of a person’s life from overarching purpose to daily tasks while synthesizing earlier valuable ideas into a coherent system that is much more integrated, usable, and understandable than how they were originally presented.
Among the new ideas explored here are:
- The importance of one’s character qualities—who you are—to what you do.
- The importance of your overarching purpose to the motivation and prioritization of what you do.
- The vital importance of your beliefs to what you do, why you do it, and how you feel about it.
- How what you value is the key to prioritization for maximal joy.
- The idea that you can only have one overarching purpose, and why.
- That the purpose of everyone’s life is joy, but many differences in implementation will be caused by what each individual values and believes.
- The role emotions play in what we do and why we do it, and what we can do to more effectively steer them towards what we want instead of allowing them to steer us away from what we want.
Another noticeable difference between the ideas in the book and ideas others have proposed is the breadth and depth of applicability. Prior approaches are tuned to specific subsets of life and specific subsets of people. However, the life plan is capable of bringing the benefits of intentionality and joy into every corner of your life, no matter who you are and what you do. The life plan will equally empower high school students, stay-at-home moms, Fortune 500 executives, priests, plumbers, and everyone in between. If you have a pulse, it will change your life.